Hunting for Red October: Remembering Tom Clancy

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In the days of my late childhood, I fell in love with two sagas: The Lord of the Rings and the story of Jack Ryan. I broke the spines of both sets of books with repeated rereading. J.R.R. Tolkien and Tom Clancy created worlds of adventure saturated with purpose in which a boy could find refuge. Even though it’s been years since I’ve read one of his books, I was saddened to hear of Tom Clancy’s death. Jack Ryan, Clancy’s creation, was a historian turned spy. He had a lot in common with Frodo Baggins, Tolkien’s diminutive champion, an upper-class flâneur turned martyr. Both went on great, world-historical adventures. They went tentatively at first, at the bidding of a mentor, and then decisively, driven by a sense of decency.

Frodo’s quest was to destroy a ring of great — and therefore inherently malevolent — power. To destroy the ring, he had to sneak into Mordor, an evil land, evading the watch of Sauron, the Dark Lord. Ryan’s Quest was less straightforward. It begins with his departure from London to deliver pictures of the Red October to James Greer, his mentor at the CIA. But like Gandalf charging Frodo with the ring’s destruction, Greer, and then the President, entrust Ryan with a quest of steadily growing importance.

The Cold War mostly figures as atmospheric backdrop in The Hunt for Red October. It is the story of how Ryan comes to meet Marko Ramius, a Soviet submarine captain, who is trying to defect to the United States along with his ship, the Red October. Ramius, like Frodo evading the Eye of Sauron, sneaks towards the U.S. dodging satellites — both American and Soviet — and sonar from other submarines and the SOSUS network that spanned the gap between Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom. Ryan is the book’s protagonist because of his sympathy for Ramius; he is the first American to figure out what Ramius is trying to do, inferring the Russian submarine captain’s intensions on the basis of scant evidence. Ramius is driven by heartbreak; his wife died at the hands of a drunken doctor, who in Clancy’s schematic political morality stands in for the systemic failures of communism.

The book’s minor characters are well-drawn. Jones, the American sonarman who finds the Red October in the vast North Atlantic, is a skinny Caltech dropout who’s trained his ears by listening to Bach; Bart Mancuso, the captain of Jones’s submarine, has the wisdom to direct his entire ship to follow Jones’s hunch. Absent Jones’s ability and Mancuso’s willingness to trust his subordinate and defy his superiors, the plot of the novel would come unraveled. Clancy sketches many others of high rank and low. He gives just enough detail to bring them to life before moving the plot along.

The genius of Clancy’s story, its basic believability, like Tolkien’s, comes from a firm commitment to letting the plot unfold logically once the initial hook is in place. It is perhaps difficult to believe there is a ring of power that confirms upon its bearer numinous strength, or that a Russian missile submarine commander, in charge of the newest and most secret sub, would defect along with all his officers. But once you buy the beginning, the rest of the books proceed with rigor.

Fantasy, as a genre, gives the author more flexibility in this regard than thrillers. Tolkien distinguishes himself from his imitators by abjuring that flexibility, and understating the fantastic in his novels. The ring conveys great power, but it is never really used as a source of power. Clancy is similarly reticent in Red October. Unlike lesser genre novels, calamity is not constantly averted at the last minute; undesirable outcomes are, however, avoided.

The shortcomings of both epics as works of literature account for their deep resonance with me as a kid. The ancillary good guys are clearly described — Barliman, an innkeeper who shelters Frodo, can “see through a brick wall in time” and Skip Tyler, an old friend of Jack Ryan’s can singlehandedly outprogram a team of “Beltway Bandits.” But the villains, such as they are, are formless.

Sauron appears directly in only one scene in the Lord of the Rings, when he interrogates one of Frodo’s friends in a brief interchange, most of which takes place off stage; he is mostly an amorfous source of anxiety and ill will. Similarly, though there is a cunning rival submarine captain who tries to destroy the Red October towards the end, and a cook who is a spy for Soviet military intelligence, neither are true villains for Clancy. He gives them their due as men honorably serving a cause. The Soviet system, rather than any person, is Clancy’s Sauron.

This is why he places such great stake in the death of Ramius’s wife; otherwise the evils of communism are mere implications of a lack of individual autonomy. The Clancy of Red October doesn’t betray much interest in political philosophy, though he is interested in the ethos of shared endeavor — one can easily imagine a Russian Tom Clancy, born and raised in Murmansk, writing the same novel with the American and Russian roles symmetrically switched. Had Mancuso’s wife died at the hands of America’s broken, profiteering health care system, he might have fled to egalitarian Russia and been welcomed.

Clancy’s nationalism is, in this sense, superficial. His narrative lingers constantly on men like Ryan himself, his mentor Greer, Sonarman Jones, Capt. Mancuso, and others who fight the system while remaining loyal to the principles the system imperfectly claims to uphold.

Much has been made of Clancy’s use of technology in his novels. The truth is there isn’t any more technology than there needs to be to move the plot along. Just as Tolkien’s linguistic fluency makes for vivd Elves — in the books “Gilthoniel a Elbereth!” has force as an incantation, giving hope to the good guys and making bad guys quiver — so too does Clancy’s nuanced understanding of the functioning of passive and active sonar drive the plot of Red October forward in lifelike fashion.

My favorite scene in Red October comes near the end. Ryan and Ramius have fooled most of the world into thinking the Red October sunk. They sail the submarine, crippled, into a U.S. Navy base in Norfolk, Va., after hiding from Soviet spy satellites. The CIA faked a truck crash to shut down the bridge spanning the entrance to Chesapeake Bay to allow the sub to pass by unseen. A gaggle of high-ranking naval officers gather to greet the submarine. Ryan, who was the only American aboard the submarine, had been talking with the Soviet defectors. He told them, accurately, that the most impressive thing about America they would find would be supermarkets.

When the submarine docks, Ryan wearily demurs from celebration, as the narrator observes that “it wasn’t his fraternity.” I was about ten when I first read these words, and I hardly knew what a fraternity was. But Clancy understood both brotherhood and the detachment one feels observing brotherhood from a remove. “In the control room the men were standing around exchanging grins, but they were quiet, as if they feared the magic of the moment would evaporate all too quickly. For Ryan it already had,” Clancy writes. Ryan, though dressed as a naval officer, wasn’t one, and so he leaves for Langley: “He walked up the gangway against traffic. No one seemed to notice him.” As Tolkien’s Frodo told his best friend Sam, “It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.”

The Hunt for Red October was first published by the Naval Institute Press. It was a cult classic before it became a bestseller. Clancy stumbled afterwards. His next book, Red Storm Rising, was a workmanlike imagining of conventional war between the U.S. and Russia. It was followed by Patriot Games, a comparatively slight book that burnishes Ryan’s backstory and The Cardinal of the Kremlin, the only time Clancy again equalled Red October in narrative texture. It has Clancy’s strongest opening lines: “Business was being conducted. All kinds of business. Everyone there knew it. Everyone there was part of it. Everyone there needed it. And yet everyone there was in one way or another dedicated to stopping it.” It is the closest Clancy came to le Carré.

Clancy lost track of Ryan’s defining feature after The Cardinal of the Kremlin. In the first three books, Ryan not only did not aspire to great power, but also did not attain it. Clancy’s later books thrust Ryan Zeliglike up the hierarchy of power, rather as if Frodo found himself accidentally King of Gondor. Clancy’s facility with plot kept me (and millions of others) reading for a while, but hobbits look silly wearing crowns.

Clancy’s heavy-handed populism proved his downfall as a writer. He can hardly restrain his glee when, in a later book, a plane crashes into the Capitol, killing almost all of America’s political leadership and leaving Jack Ryan as a righteous president. It was around the time of that book — Debt of Honor — that Clancy began lending his name out to other authors, franchising the goodwill he had earned with Red October. He himself became a system, a lucrative factory for the production of technothrillers. He became a man that the Jack Ryan of Red October, who drunkenly quotes Shelley’s “Ozymandias”: “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair” would not much have liked.

Clancy caught the spirit of the late Cold War as well as anyone, before catching the spirit of the Tea Party. Red October closes with Ryan’s moral disappointment in his CIA superiors and with himself. Ryan is aware of his incipient resignation to the corrupting influence of spycraft. He finds himself “forgetting the seaman’s code,” and laments his own ability to compromise.

The subtlety went out of Clancy’s writing long before his death, but not before he gave us the story of Jack Ryan, reluctant spy, who set out from his house to deliver pictures of a submarine and ended up delivering the submarine itself.

I.
It seems fitting to begin a reflection on the late David Foster Wallace in a fit of anxiety about reception - about the propensity of words, sentences, personae, to falsify or to be misunderstood.
For example: I know this seems fraudulent and fanciful and like the scratching of some deep narcissistic itch, to write publicly about a famous person's death. And also: I want you to know I know, and to make sure you know I want you to know I know, so that you don't mistake me for someone less intelligent, original, precise, and self-critical than I am. Because I am terrified of the ethical misstep, of solipsism, and above all of getting things wrong.
So, I think, was my subject, for whom the vicious regress sketched above could go on infinitely, each new confession forcing a confession about the rhetoric behind that confession. Indeed, in his later work, as in the short story "Octet," David Foster Wallace found a way to make the regress feel infinite. Some readers saw in this a kind of heroism - a commitment to representing philosophical truth, no matter how ungainly. Others saw it as evidence that Wallace had hit some kind of aesthetic cul-de-sac. Some even saw it as both: a heroic cul-de-sac. But it seems to me that Wallace's manic sincerity was merely the obverse of our age's reflexive irony. Each was an expression of deep suspicion of abstractions like "trust" and "faith."
Which makes Wallace's achievement even more impressive. Ultimately, his characters and narrators managed to push beyond paradox and to risk saying something about what used to be called the human condition. In honor of those risks - and with the preliminary apologiae more or less in place - let me try here to risk saying something about David Foster Wallace.
II.
David Foster Wallace was a large, shaggy, uncomfortable, funny person who once held me and 75 other people hostage for over an hour in a basement room in St. Louis. He was reading from his new book, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. I was 19, and when the reading was over I squeaked out something like, "Infinite Jest really meant a lot to me," and he said something like, "Do you want me to sign your copy?" and I said something like "I checked it out of the library" and then I ran away.
That is, Wallace was a person I did not, in any respectable sense of the word, know, though I am currently feeling a dreadful temptation to pretend otherwise, to insist on a connection between reader and writer, to assert some rights over the body, and over the life, and over the work. Then again, in another sense, I knew him - I did. I heard the critic John Leonard say one time that the great writers, the ones who matter, are "friends of the mind," and David Foster Wallace was mine. Simply put: his work has mattered more to me, and for longer, than any other writer's, and when he killed himself last week at age 46, I felt like I had lost a friend. His voice is still in my head.
I came to that voice in high school, when I first read Infinite Jest. This was immediately and not incidentally prior to my discovery of literature per se. I read the thousand-page book more or less continuously for three weeks (as would be my habit every few years) and I felt like someone was speaking to me directly, in my language, about people I knew, or had been. "Like most North Americans of his generation," Wallace wrote, in a passage that hooked me early on, Hal Incandenza
tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.
The secret power of this voice, as Wallace would discover in his essay "Authority and American Usage," lay in its immense ethical appeal. Although his descriptions of Hal's life at a tennis academy, and of pharmaceutical habits or Eschaton, did not stint on arcana, Wallace was perfectly willing to admit that certain things were "hard to say." Moreover, there was the seeming correspondence between the authorial persona and the real person I glimpsed through the interstices of the fiction, and, later, nonfiction.
That person was like an extreme caricature of many generational traits: polymathic, ironic, brilliant, damaged, and under intense pressure to perform. The difference was that DFW (as I came to think of him) had performed. Unlike so many of the other great minds of our time, he had made good on his promise, less by virtue of talent than through moral courage and hard work. I still think the elucidation of Gerhard Schtitt's tennis philosophy in Infinite Jest is some of the best writing about writing I've ever read: "How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away." Wallace somehow managed to pay attention to everything.
III.
Of course, nothing is so unforgivable in postmodern America as an assertion of one's own value, and in various large and small ways, Wallace's critical reception would be dampened by schadenfreude. The surest way to marginalize the literary high-water-mark of the 1990s would be to exaggerate its (considerable) length and difficulty. "Sure Infinite Jest is great," the logic went, "but does anybody actually read it?"
Similarly, I think, it would be both inaccurate and reductive to blame the burden of following up a masterpiece for driving Wallace to his death. In the 10 years that followed Infinite Jest - which might have been a perfectly reasonable gestation period for another long novel - Wallace published five books, for a more than respectable average of one every two years. The short stories "Church Not Made With Hands" and "Good Old Neon," and the essays on the porn industry and John McCain in Consider the Lobster would be among his best work.
Furthermore, it was impossible to read about the Depressed Person in "The Depressed Person" and not to understand that the author had known depression on the most wrenching and intimate and long-term terms. The suicide that now hangs shadelike over the Wallace corpus in fact predated it, at least as a potentiality; think of The Sad Stork and Kate Gompert and "Suicide as a Sort of Present" and the narrator of "Good Old Neon."
Or don't, because revisiting Wallace's work is liable to offer more questions than answers. E.g.: How can someone with so much going for him have felt so bad? How could such an ambitious communicator have settled for this final muteness? And what, in the end, can we say about it?
IV.
We can say, first of all, that David Foster Wallace's death is a historic loss for readers. To me, the self-annihilating qualities of "Octet" and "Mister Squishy" and "Oblivion" didn't read as fictional dead-ends, but as attempts to solve, once and for all, the preoccupations of Wallace's youth, prior to some astonishing new novel.
And we can remember that that book would have reflected a side of David Foster Wallace his critics didn't often acknowledge: the metaphysician. In retrospect, Wallace's belief in something larger than logic is everywhere: in Schtitt's philosophies, in the prayerful ending of "The View From Mrs. Thompson's," and in "Good Old Neon," where a suicide suggests that "all the infinitely dense and shifting worlds of stuff inside you every moment of your life [turn] out now to be somehow fully open and expressible afterward." Indeed, it offers some solace to recall that Wallace imagined death, in Infinite Jest, as a restoration, a
catapult[ing] home over fans and the Convexity's glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world's well-known tongues.
This lovely image of connection posits death as the antithesis of depression, whose cause and effect, as Wallace diagnosed them, was the ontological problem of aloneness. Wallace revisited the proposition again and again, most recently in a soon-to-be-minutely-parsed commencement address at Kenyon College:
I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of what your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.
But on this point, Wallace, who got so much right and saw so much so clearly, fell prey to a junior-grade fallacy, which now deepens into irony. As he himself put it in Infinite Jest: "sometimes words that seem to express really invoke."
Even as Wallace's darkest images expressed the anguish of existential solitude, the act of writing fiction, of writing it so well, was itself an invocation of community. His finest creation, Don Gately (the Leopold Bloom of Infinite Jest) bodies forth the possibility of true empathy, and we learn, through a series of hints, that he will try to lead Hal Incandenza out of the prison of the self.
Gately's secret? He has come to understand that there is no proof, that some things one simply takes on faith. And as Gately observes, it works. David Foster Wallace's death looks, from where I'm sitting, like a failure of communication. But his life, and his work, are an affirmation of it. Death is not the end.

Baseball can do that, I guess. It can remind you of everything that once mattered to you, everything that matters still. It can brush the great promise of tomorrow against the agreeable sting of the past, and the sorrows of today.

4 comments:

I liked the video game The Hunt for Red October when I was a kid, the one where you play the submarine itself. But let’s not forget that the man was a warmonger of a particularly 1980s type, a writer of bloodless wars, optimistic wars and a panderer to Right-wingers in and out of the military.

Right before 9/11, sitting around the Marine base at 29 Palms I picked up a copy of The Bear and the Dragon. Highlighted in this mangled heap of bad intentions is a scene where a Baptist preacher man in China is killed in front of CNN reporters (who are filming) while trying, up close as it were, to stop the forced abortion of a fetus under China’s One Policy program. If I recall the woman is already in stirrups when the film crew bursts in and the Baptist preacher is shot in the head by an evil Chinese soldier. The scene is a howling melodrama aimed at firing up the Evangelical masses who always made up a large part of his readership. Sanctions follow, and then an invasion of Siberia and a terrestrial nuclear launch that is brought down by a good Russkie with a submachine gun who sprays the missile as it leaves the launch silo, destroying it. He dies in this act of self-sacrifice, fulfilling the Cold War truism that the only good Russkie is a dead Russkie.

When I was in intel school (also before 9/11) one of our older instructors (who was an enlisted marine) told us to always watch out for the civilian Iraq intelligence analysts at the DoD and the other agencies and to take everything they said with a grain of salt. The reason being that these fat, jovial men had all been Soviet analysts in the 80s and had switched to Iraq when their jobs became obsolete. They had in doing so brought with them the mentality of total warfare and gameness that these Cold Warriors had employed to such great effect and enjoyment in the 80s. Tom Clancy was the willing mouthpiece for these august gentlemen.

More pointedly, Clancy was a cheerleader of death who’s books helped encourage at least two generations that warfare was easy and fun. His trashy output were like romance novels of death and war. His military characters have the verisimilitude of Daffy Duck. Clancy’s output merely reflects the titanic egotism of Pentagon generals, the only members of the military that Clancy personally knew well. Only from this grim psychological perspective is Clancy of any interest. When you read his books you see what Reagan saw in the mirror.

Also, I might add, there is a major difference between Tolkien and Clancy, that being that Tolkien had been in a war and seen what a war does, as opposed to Clancy who was never in a war nor ever a member of any armed service. It should be no surprise at all which writer was more concerned about the taking of a human life.

TriQuarterly, the long-running trail-blazing literary journal more or less dreamed into existence by the late Charles Newman, is apparently no more, due to budget cuts at Northwestern University. Newman's foreword to his first issue as editor, reprinted at A Public Space, should be required reading for anyone thinking about the purpose and future of the little magazine and its role in the artistic ecology.